Few animals are as well suited to a snowbound winter as the Canada lynx. Its most striking features all earn their keep in that hard season: a dense grey-brown coat that locks in warmth, black tufts rising from the tips of its ears that funnel the faintest rustle toward its sharp hearing, and broad paws thickly furred on the underside. Those oversized paws spread the cat's weight as it walks, working much like a pair of snowshoes, so that it glides across soft, deep snow that would leave a heavier hunter floundering.
What the lynx eats sets it apart from almost every other wild cat, for it leans on a single animal: the snowshoe hare. So tightly is the cat bound to this one prey that its own fortunes climb and fall with the hare's. In years when hares are plentiful, the lynx raise more young and their numbers swell; when the hares grow scarce, the cats go hungry and their population sinks soon after, a rise and fall that plays out roughly once a decade.
